FELLER, FRANÇOIS-XAVIER. - Jesuit, scholar and skilled apologist, b. in Brussels on 18 April 1736, d. in Regensburg on 23 May 1802. Having completed his course of studies, he began his career as a preacher in Luxembourg and Liège; but the subsequent suppression of the Society of Jesus (1773) led him to devote himself entirely to the mission of a writer. Besides his talent, his prodigious memory, his many travels throughout Europe and his keen spirit of observation and research were of help to him in this. The French Revolution forced him to leave Belgium and take refuge first in Paderborn and then in Regensburg.
He wrote a great deal, with the sole aim of effectively defending religion against the raging errors of the Enlightenment, of Febronianism and of Josephinism, and within the question of the nunciatures. From 1769 he collaborated with many articles in the Journal de Verdun, or La clef du cabinet des Princes de l'Europe ou recueil historique et politique sur les matières du temps, published in Luxembourg; a collaboration that he strengthened when, in 1773, he became its director and almost its sole writer, publishing it under the new title of Journal historique et littéraire (60 vols., 1773-94), also published in Luxembourg, until its printing was prohibited by Joseph II, because it openly denounced
(Int. Enc. Catt.)
FELONIO - F. of the Pontifical Greek College - Rome.
mente the despotic abuses in the ecclesiastical sphere; having therefore moved in 1788 to Liège and in 1791 to Maastricht.
The principal articles were then published separately under the title Mélanges de politique, de morale chrétienne et de littérature (4 vols., Louvain 1822-24); then reproduced in Cours de morale chrétienne et de littérature religieuse (5 vols., Paris 1826).
An addition to the Journal is to be considered the 18 vols. of Recueil de représentations, protestations et réclamations faites à S. M. I. par les représentants et états des dix provinces des Pays-Bas autrichiens assemblés (s. l., from 1773; immediately translated into Flemish [Amsterdam 1787-90]). But the principal work remains the Dictionnaire historique (6 vols., Augsburg 1781-84). Although prohibited by the Austrian government, it had successive editions, always brought up to date, down to the 9th of 1837, when it took the name Biographie universelle, published by M. Pérennès, T. Simonin and C. Weiss; but the additions and reworkings made it lose its original character. Other works to be mentioned: Catéchisme philosophique (Liège 1772, under the pseudonym of Flexier de Reval), which, reprinted and updated many times both by the author and by others (the edition of the countess of Genlis, Paris 1820, is to be excluded), held the field of apologetics, for its careful perspicuity and acuteness, until the middle of the 19th century. It must not be passed over in silence, however, that in Opuscules théologico-philosophiques (Mechelen 1824, a posthumous collection of opuscules) F. expressed erroneous ideas concerning the errors of the Synod of Pistoia, condemned by the bull «Auctorem Fidei»; they were refuted by Card. Giacinto Gerdil with his Animadversiones in natas... cl. Feller (Rome-Venice 1795).